Ode to the Physical Body

For others to love you you got to love yourself first 

Not going to lie I have struggled with loving myself.

Devotion is what saved me, but I wrote this in another blog (it’s here if you want to read it https://os.me/short-stories/from-darkness-to-light/) so I’m not going to digress.

My life has not always been easy. Although I guess compared to others it has not been so bad, after all. Just difficult. Full of obstacles, pebbles and larger rocks stuck on the road. I mean, I touched rock bottom a couple of times. I stepped into the fire of transformation more than once. Now that I am older and supposedly wiser I see that it was all part of a divine plan, as it usually is. 

I remember one of my teachers saying “Don’t expect the universe to deliver what it has not promised.” And I have had no expectations since then. OK, I’ll be honest maybe a little bit I have. But less and less, I promise. Although I am much harder on myself than on others, as most of us are. 

For years I struggled to appreciate my physical body and to love it while it transforms itself because life. And aging. 

I have no doubts that the body is a mysterious web of energies that move and mix and swim together to create and maintain the magic of movement, synergies, densities and flows that is who you are on the outside. Everything working in silence to keep it all in place. The breath, the glue that keeps it all together. Webbing and flowing. Flowing and webbing.

I look at myself these days, particularly my hands because they are in front of me as I type. They look rough and leathery like the brown satchel I had to have when I was in high school because everyone else did. Rough, like a cheap towel you find in old motels, no matter how much cream I lather into them. All veins and feebleness. Skin red, marked by too many washes and too much time spent using them. They look like the lines you see on leaves when they fall from trees and rest on the ground. Silenced and stepped on by by-passers. How did my hands get old like this? Do yours look like this too?

And then the nails, how did they get so squared, short, uncured, unpolished, un-loved? Cuticles growing, covering half of the space that belonged to them.The opposite of a manicured hand, that’s what’s happening right now. Wild weeds in a garden of unkept roses. And then I cut myself some slack, “You are in a super tiny village in the middle of the Himalayas, where are you going to find a nail salon, Elena? Speak nicely to yourself.”

I watched a video from Swamijii the other day and he was talking about how unrealistic it is to think that your body does not get old. His words felt like a warm cosy blanket resting on the shoulders during a cold night. So much thank you for the reality check. 

Intelligent the body, capable of healing itself when you get out of the way.  Smart, knowing, and strong, yet feeble if the case may be. Held together by a divine thread like the rest of our existence, after all. I keep thinking, when am I going back to looking like I was in my 3os? Every day I except some miraculous change in the body intelligence that brings me back to that time and every night I realize the magic has not happened. Or maybe it’s magic that’s happening right now, come to think of it. All muscles, and tendons, and bones, and cells working like soldiers following the leader, the inhale and the exhale creating and maintaining the rhythm of it all.

In full disclosure, I have been thinking about my mortality these days. And asked myself, what would happen if I were not here any more, if I had taken the place of my ex husband  (may he Rest In Peace) who died a year ago, in the order of things?

And yet the body and its intelligence, vibrancy and smartness keep me here bending and twisting and moving and resting, and functioning like a miracle.  

Get to the moral of the story, Elena! Ok here it is, 

Love yourself.

Love who you were, when you didn’t know the things you know now.

Love yourself in this very moment. 

Love your body and its magic. 

The body flows and so do my words. Just sliding. Like water on oil.

Thanks for reading ❤️